Happenstance

Fair Whether

The Lilith Fair reportedly toyed with adding some male-fronted
acts to its festival. The organizers had already begun to ignore their more
publicly stated mandate: to foster bands that weren't getting a proper hearing
due to admittedly discouraging booking and promotional practices in the
music industry.

Do the Pretenders or Sheryl Crow or one-megahit-wonder
Lisa Loeb really need help reaching a wider audience? Even Lilith founder
Sarah McLachlan, whose fans filled theaters nationally before she began
the festival, is now a stadium- (or at least Oakdale-) sized presence, with
or without extra festival packaging.

This leaves Lilith's much-mocked yet noble female-friendly
underpinnings as its raison d'etre. You could see it in the info
booths that taught you about chlamydia or about "Women in Debt"
aspects of the international movement to retire Third World debts. You could
see it in fashion boutiques and other capitalistic concerns that clogged
the thoroughfare, or in demographically apt samples of fruit-sweet Arbor
Mist wines and Bioré facial cleansers.

And you could see it in the restrooms, where streams, so
to speak, of women rushed into toilet facilities clearly marked (and simultaneously
used by) "Men." We counted over a dozen women entering one such
room before we realized that standing there doing what could easily be misconstrued
as loutish "girlwatching" was not in the spirit of Lilith. From
that lobby outpost we also noticed local rocker Johnny McCarthy of
Groove Fiction Sex Ceremony being unceremoniously evicted from Meadows
by two security guards and a bouncer, Sex rearing its ugly head in another
direction.

The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde explained to the mainstage
audience why the band hadn't appeared on previous Lilith tours. "You
have to take a test ... and we've always failed the questionnaire. This
year we answered it correctly. There was one question: 'What do you call
that useless bit of skin at the end of a penis?'

"That's right... A man!" The woman sitting
next to us responded with glee, then turned to soothe our wounded male ego:
"I have to clap, because I'm a woman. Besides, it's funny."

Much of the entertainment this year was equally pat. One
glorious exception was Aimee Mann, whose following has not diminished
during her well-publicized record company battles. For her brief set at
the outdoor Second Stage, she was backed by former Grays and Michael
Penn guitarist, and longtime Aimee sideMann Buddy Judge (who
drummed on an upturned plastic carton for one song) and Chamberlin champion
Patrick Warren, a Lilith veteran from Fiona Apple's 1997 appearances.
Three of Mann's seven live numbers were new, and other fresh material was
on sale: an anticipatory EP promoting her forthcoming self-distributed third
solo album (visit http://www.aimeemann.com
for info). High expectations, met and exceeded.

Founding Lilith ubiquity McLachlan joined both Lisa Loeb
and The Pretenders onstage. Chrissie Hynde had earlier joked, "Hey,
where's all the flowy dresses I've been promised?" McLachlan fulfilled
that promise, though she later changed out of her quaint quasi-Indian-print
dress (the type you might find at Group W Bench or Dava locally) into sequined
blue slacks and a white tank top for her own show-closing set. The finale
involved a McLachlan encore with backing vocals from Sheryl Crow and classical
motifs from Crow's band's cellist and violinist. Followed by members from
many of the eight-hour fair's acts in a rousing cover of "I Shall Be
Released." As distinct from the rest-room crashers, who shall be relieved.